Introducing the Bot Shop

Today, we’re launching our brand new Bot Shop, a place to find bots to chat with in Kik. Bots provide you with fun, engaging, and useful services, all through chat.

The Bot Shop features bots from a list of our partners, including Funny Or Die,Riffsy,Sephora,Vine, andThe Weather Channel, with more to come. Find laughs, watch videos, get makeup tips, see the hottest GIFs, and find out if it’s going to rain tomorrow… You can do it all on Kik.

You can find the Bot Shop in Kik by tapping on the search magnifying glass, then “Find People.” On the web, you can visit bots.kik.com.

We decided to open the Bot Shop after noticing several big trends. For a start, people are downloading fewer and fewer apps. Two-thirds of U.S. smartphone users downloaded zero apps in the last month, according to a study by Comscore. Meanwhile, people are spending loads of time in chat apps like Kik. Last year, 1.4 billion people used a chat app, according toeMarketer, and they spend a lot of time in those apps. Our research has shown that people spend 35 minutes per session in Kik.

We wanted to find a way to get more out of chat without adding to the clutter or detracting from the simplicity of the experience in Kik. We’ve found that bots offer a great low-friction way to do that. There’s nothing to download, no new registration required, and you can use an interface you’re already familiar with: chat.

To coincide with the launch, we’re also releasing some new features that help make the bot experience smooth and enjoyable. Kik’s web bubbles (“wubbles”) provide a new way of displaying rich media in conversation threads. We’ve revamped “suggested responses,” which now take over the whole keyboard space and allow you to select options while chatting to a bot without having to type anything in. We’re also releasing a “mentions” feature, which allows you to call a bot into a conversation by typing the “@” symbol. That means bots can now be participants in your chats with friends.

These are just the early days for the Bot Shop, so you can expect lots more to come. We’ve also invited developers to start building bots for Kik using our new bot API, available at dev.kik.com.